Merry Christmas, folks! We’re still in the twelve days of Christmas right now, and will be for a while. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be making a Saturday Note for next week, as the next few days are going to be a little bit hectic.
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Sucking Up to Disney
I try to not make these posts too repetitive. I notice when I harp too much on the same topics, and I try to switch it up on what I talk about. I don’t always want to talk about my problems with the same companies/serieses/books. So I thought I’d try to come up with something that wasn’t about Disney. Except then when I was checking for news on Rick Riordan’s website, I came across this.
If you don’t feel like reading the link, it’s a post on Rick Riordan’s blog that doesn’t really tell much news at all. Presented as a conversation between himself and the Olympian gods (he writes kids’ books about Greek mythology, after all), he talks about the idea of an upcoming screen adaptation of his work. The gist of it is that after the last couple of movies didn’t do that well, 20th Century Fox decided not to go ahead and make a third, and now that Fox Entertainment was bought by Disney, the rights for any movie adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians now belongs to Disney. He’s had some meetings, fans have made the idea trend on social media, and once Riordan even spent a week in Los Angeles, but so far there’s nothing actually moving forward.
The entire thing felt… well, okay, I know I’m not in Riordan’s target audience, and haven’t been for a long time, but this felt really corny and unfunny. He made a post to announce… that there haven’t been any developments to announce. And I get that maybe it was meant to be a cheeky little thing for fans, but what does he spend it doing? Having the gods talk about how powerful Disney is, how brilliant and beloved Riordan is, and how he really wants a good adaptation of his work.
I’ve already written a bit about how I feel weird about this turnaround that Riordan’s had about the movies. When the first film came out, Riordan didn’t say much about it, other than announcing the casting and that he wasn’t planning on seeing it, because he didn’t want the version of the story from the movies to affect his vision. He did claim that his sons saw it and liked it, but he very clearly distanced himself from the films and told everyone he had very little to do with them.
Except not, because in the past couple of years, whenever they come up he tells everyone how much he hated them, how they’re terrible movies, terrible adaptations, with no value whatsoever, and how he did get a chance to edit a script, but those hacks at Fox didn’t listen to him, and if only they had they would have had a fantastic million-dollar movie franchise by now. It feels really entitled and annoying. I don’t mind an author being dissatisfied with his or her works’ adaptations, but it’s quite a huge difference to do this full 180, and then not only say you didn’t like it, but insist that if only those fools had listened then everything would have worked out.
So I’m already… not thrilled with the direction of this post. He seems to act like 20th Century Fox being dismantled, plenty of projects cancelled, people losing their jobs, and being absorbed into Disney is some sort of just punishment for the studio’s hubris, not really caring about the fact that Disney is the most powerful entertainment juggernaut in the industry and that’s a bad thing. He makes references to the “hydra of the Mouse God” which sounds like satire, but he’s still begging these people to make his movie. So it comes across less like he’s mocking their power as much as… elevating it to godlike level.
“Please do this adaptation, and do it in a way I’ll approve of! It’ll be great!” Never mind that outside of its remakes, Lucasfilm and Marvel films, Disney’s live-action properties tend to be one-shots that don’t do very well and they don’t give as much advertising to. So even if Disney decided to go ahead with an adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, chances are it won’t get a lot of marketing so that Disney can prepare for their live-action Lilo and Stitch remake.
Worse than that is how self-congratulatory this post sounds. When you are an author and you write yourself talking to the gods, and you write the gods saying how beloved you are, how successful you are, and how you have millions of fans… look, step back and look at this, will you? This is downright weird in how upfront it is. It’s Riordan bragging about how wonderful he is, and how blessed Disney would be to do a movie with his input in it.
What the actual fudge, Riordan.
I think at this point it’s become rather common knowledge that authors shouldn’t reply to online reviews, or harass people who don’t like their books, or that sort of thing. Don’t do that thing where you write an essay saying how the people hating on your books actually secretly like your books, the way Laurel K. Hamilton did. Nor reply to an Amazon reply claiming that haters are “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective” the way Anne Rice did.
But this isn’t good either. This self-congratulatory short that has the gods themselves declaring how great he is, where he brags about how many fans he has, about how he could make a movie that’s a smash hit adaptation in an age when almost all the successful big budget films are either remakes or superhero films.
I’m becoming more and more frustrated with Riordan’s public persona, and with his writing seemingly going on forever and ever. He doesn’t need to declare how great he is to the world. I’m not even saying he can’t have a public persona. But this thig he does where he talks about how great he is? And won’t shut up about it? And how he can’t get over how much he hates the movie of his work?
It’s annoying as all get-out. If you ever become a successful writer, poet, artist, whatever--don’t do this.
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